Who knew that Oscar the Grouch, the timeless green curmudgeon who lives in a trash can on “Sesame Street,” was carefully designed to promote concepts such as empathy and perspective?

“He likes things people don't like,” Charlotte Cole, an executive with Sesame Workshop, the educational organization behind “Sesame Street,” told a group at Clark University Friday. “It gives kids an avenue into a different way of looking at things.”

Ms. Cole, senior vice president for global education with Sesame Workshop, was the keynote speaker at an annual afternoon of workshops and networking held by Clark's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program.

Behind Ms. Cole's colorful slides and funny video clips appeared to be a serious, global approach to early childhood education that has developed 30 locally produced versions of “Sesame Street” around the world.

Ms. Cole tracked for the audience at Razzo Hall in the Traina Center for the Arts the origins of the public television phenomenon in the 1960s-era of President Lyndon B. Johnson's war on poverty. Education was seen as a way to lift children out of poverty, and Joan Cooney, the show's creator, was able to deliver a new model of educational television based on sound, researched evidence and models, Ms. Cole said.

Ms. Cooney wanted to take innate learning of jingles and other messages absorbed from watching television and “channel it into things of value for kids: The alphabet, numbers, things they needed to know.”

As “Sesame Street” expanded globally, control over content was given to local productions to reduce the impression that the show was spreading “American imperialism” to other countries.

In India, for example, the show, Galli Galli Sim Sim, focuses on the strengthening of women's roles in society. In Ghana, literacy is emphasized.

In South Africa, where one out of nine people are infected with HIV, the character Kami is HIV-positive. Ms. Cole said that at the time Kami was introduced, there was intense pushback in America — some critics thought it was pushing sex education on young children. But in South Africa, the character was largely welcomed as a way to combat a public health crisis.

“It gives people a lexicon for talking about the disease,” she said.

In the developing world, the show's reach and the educational materials that accompany it are having a real impact on early education, she said. Worldwide, for every 100 children, 25 will begin first grade but not complete fifth grade, according to UNICEF statistics Ms. Cole cited.

Statistics like that narrow the show's educational emphasis to promoting literacy, healthy living and a positive sense of self, Ms. Cole said.

She said that in Bangladesh, for example, where a lack of electricity in many regions forces the show to be shown on rickshaws to crowds of children, there were noticeable gains in children who came to watch the show. They were shown to have a command of the alphabet and counting that put some of them a whole year ahead of their peers.

The show wouldn't be as popular with all work and no play, however, and Ms. Cole talked about some of the cultural quirks and sensitivities that change the show from country to country. For example, in Germany, the equivalent of the Big Bird character is a brown bear, Ms. Cole said.

But when executives started working on developing the show in China, Chinese producers wanted to make sure they could have Big Bird.